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This One’s for Daddy

The dirt-poor man of the South — the much-caricatured hillbilly, the redneck, the malicious drinker of mean moonshine, proud to the point of self-destruction, brave to the verge of madness, who’d fight you as soon as look at you but cherishes an atavistic sense of decency and fairness, even chivalry — that man has long been a puzzlement to much of the rest of America and, often as not, to himself. And one man like that, whose people were like that, was Rick Bragg’s father, Charles. “The Prince of Frogtown” is his story, and theirs.

Bragg has been looking for his old man for a long time, although he didn’t always know that. In his best-selling 1997 memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” he told the story of his mother and her love and courage raising three kids on welfare and the wages she could get picking cotton or cleaning houses in east Alabama. In “Ava’s Man,” the next book Bragg wrote about his family, he told of his mother’s father but not of his own. “I sawed my family tree off at the fork,” Bragg writes here, “and made myself a man with half a history.”

Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, couldn’t begin to get his daddy into focus and thought that he didn’t want to try after all he’d seen his momma endure: “Against his darkness her light was even brighter, as she just absorbed his cruelties till she could not take them into herself anymore.” So like many reporters who know how to use a pen as a sword and a notebook as a shield, he reduced his father to a literary device in the book about his momma. “He became nothing more than the sledge I used to pound out her story of unconditional love.” And by the time Bragg was in his 40s he’d convinced himself that his father had become “no more than a question I answered at book signings in nice-sounding clichés.”

But Bragg was still hunting for his father, and the memories of the man who drank himself to death with a vengeance in 1975 hunted him, too, as such memories do. “My boy,” Willie Morris told him, “there is no place you can go he will not be.”

As Bragg tells the story here, what made him open up his mind to his father was the sudden appearance in his own life of a 10-year-old stepson. The kid seemed to Bragg to have been coddled and cuddled too much, and in the early pages of the book “the boy,” as he is called, looks suspiciously like another literary device. He is the antithesis of the boy Bragg remembers himself being in a world that for better or worse, mainly worse, was dominated by the ways of Bragg’s reckless daddy.

Photo

The authors father, Charles Bragg, left, with an unidentified friend.Credit
From “The Prince of Frogtown”

Compared with the hardscrabble mountain and mill-town tale of the father, the soft-edged suburban narrative of the stepson and Bragg’s relationship with him feels gooey and romanticized. But eventually it balances the account of Charles Bragg’s life, leavens it and lightens it. There are some very funny passages about Rick and the boy, especially toward the end of the book when Charles’s ineluctable decline and death become almost too painful to contemplate. “My father was already waking with the shakes when I was born,” Bragg writes at one point. And then several pages later: “His death was so certain it was like it already happened.”

The deadly fatalism not just of his father, but of his people and of the whole pre-Sun-Belt South is deeply familiar to Bragg and beautifully evoked by his musical prose. He writes of ancestors who, at night, “beat Irish drums, tooted tin whistles and plucked dulcimers as they danced across dirt floors, and sang in lilting, tragic voice of lost homes, lost love and lost wars,” setting the scene for the story of a man whose great lost cause was himself. Bragg has an unflinching eye for the telling details of rural poverty and the terrible mixing of social monotony and industrial danger that marked those living in the company houses of a Southern mill town. Looked down on by everybody around them, they lived in “Frogtown,” near a creek crawling with snakes and flowing with pestilence.

“They absorbed degradation at work, and took it out on each other when the hated whistle blew,” Bragg writes. “But in this community of violence and suffering were some of the finest people who have ever lived, who scraped a few handfuls of flour into a brown paper bag, house by house, until a full bag could be delivered to a family whose provider was sick, shot, cut or hurt in the machines. The choking dust took a lot of them, and some just never got over the fact that they left their mist-shrouded mountains for this, and died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between.”

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Charles Bragg’s tragedy was that he had the sense to want out, and even to get out, but he couldn’t stay away. He was a marine during the Korean War but came back to be at home, to show off, to fall in love. And then the drinking got real bad. And worse. Charles tried to get away one more time, taking his wife and boys to Dallas, where he found a good job, steady pay and a nice house. But Rick’s mother would not trust her husband to make good. She wanted the security, such as it was, of the welfare check she’d gotten used to in his long absences. She went back home to the mill town and to her mother and took the kids.

Eventually Charles followed, too. But he was broken by then, and it seemed as if every encounter with his family was a spectacle of crazy-drunk cruelty: “One night he staggered into the house and greeted my mother with a big smile. He was missing his front teeth. The thing she had loved about him most was his white, perfect teeth, and he had gotten them pulled, for meanness.” And there was the time he brought his sons a fine dog, then brought it back days later mangled and dying from fighting in a pit. Bragg’s hatred burned so intense that for the longest time, for almost 40 years, he would not remember what happened one night when his father saved his life.

There are moments when you think Bragg will tell you that despite everything he loved his father, but he never does say it quite. He is even surprised when his mother, after all these years, says she really did love the man. What Bragg tells us is something he inferred from a pair of loaded dice among the few possessions his father left him, a message of sorts: “Rig the game if you can, ’cause luck is a bitch for a poor man; and don’t worry what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.”

Charles Bragg will remain a puzzlement. But Rick Bragg has made of the dark shadow in his life a figure of flesh and blood, passion and tragedy, and a father, at last, whose memory he can live with. And that is no small thing for any man to do.

THE PRINCE OF FROGTOWN

By Rick Bragg.

255 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek magazine’s Paris bureau chief, is the author of “Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: This One’s for Daddy. Today's Paper|Subscribe